Book Bingo Nine – Double Bingo and BINGO – Row Six Across completed.

Literary and Romance

It’s the end of April, and another Book Bingo week with Amanda and Theresa. This time, I am ticking off two squares as another double bingo week, but also, I have a complete bingo with the sixth across row, as seen below:

Row Six:

Literary: Zebra and Other Stories by Debra Adelaide – AWW2019

Crime: All the Tears in China by Sulari Gentill – AWW2019

Historical: The Familiars by Stacey Halls

Romance: Northanger Abbey by Jane Austen

Comedy: Best Foot Forward by Adam Hills

Romance was one that I wasn’t sure how I would fill, as it is not a genre I read often or gravitate towards. Rather, I prefer the romance to be subtle and to happen alongside the core story, and where the characters have much more to them than it feels like many romance novels do. So, in my quest to read as much Jane Austen as possible this year, and books inspired by Jane’s works, I chose Northanger Abbey.

Northanger Abbey is the first of Jane Austen’s novels to be completed for publication in 1803, but the last published in 1817. It is a satirical look at the Gothic novels of the time, and the coming of age story of Catherine Morland, wishing for happiness and morality over money and wealth like other young women of her age. She loves to read and seeks others like her as friends. On a sojourn to Bath with family friends, she meets Henry Tilney, and Isabella Allen, and becomes friends with Isabelle, visits with the Tilneys and is eventually forced home after a series of misunderstandings. At the core is Catherine’s growth and understanding of real life, which is vastly different to her novels. At the same time, she has fallen in love with Tilney and they eventually marry on the final page.

The romance in this novel is subtle, and develops slowly and cautiously alongside friendship, novel reading and ideas of class and acceptability of marriage. The subtlety of the romance allowed the characters to grow for themselves and not be pushed into a certain way of thinking by other characters. Of course, there are misunderstandings that led to the desire to correct things and set things straight, but at the same time, because it is subtle, it worked well and that’s why I enjoyed it.

Literary

For this category, I chose a book sent to me by Writing NSW to review for their blog. Zebra and Other Stories by Debra Adelaide. In this book, there are many short stories, from different perspectives and about different things – a more in-depth review is here. But this classifies as literary because it simply has that feel to it, and when I think about it, these stories don’t have a distinct genre – sometimes literary fiction does, but sometimes not. Sometimes, they just slot into general fiction but because the strength of the stories are driven by the characters, rather than the plots, which are written so subtlety, that at times, they do not become clear until the end, which makes them powerful and intriguing.

Moving forward, I have about eight months left to fill the bingo card, and some are going to be harder but that’s part of the challenge, and sometimes, the review books just easily slip into a category, sometimes I have to seek one out.